MUSIC

MUSIC; A Boss As Tough As the Nails He Pounded

By ANTHONY TOMMASINI

Published: February 15, 2004

EARLY one morning in September 1995, just 11 days before the Metropolitan Opera was to inaugurate its innovative system for simultaneous translation of opera texts, Joseph Volpe, the company's general manager, stood in a cluttered grand-tier box in the empty house, explaining the new technology to me. The box was strewn with small rectangular screens and strips of support railing. Jutting from the floor in nearby boxes were felt-covered rods sprouting branches of unconnected wires.

With all the seeming disarray, I asked, would the system be ready on opening night, when Plácido Domingo was to sing the title role in Verdi's ''Otello''?

''You're making me nervous,'' Mr. Volpe said. But he asserted, ''We'll be ready.'' He was right. Met Titles, as the house's patented system is called, quickly proved a hit with audiences.

Mr. Volpe, 63, announced last week that he would leave his post in 2006, ending what will have been a 42-year association with the Met. Improbably, that association took a Flatbush-born high school graduate with no advanced education, no musical training and scant feeling for opera from an entry-level job as an apprentice carpenter to the general manager's office in 1990. It is sometimes said of a hands-on chief executive who has worked his way to the top that he knows every nail in the place. This is really true of Mr. Volpe, who hammered quite a few nails into the place himself.

Showing off the company's $2.7 million system that day, Mr. Volpe was in his element. Say what you will about its artistic quality, under Mr. Volpe, a tough-guy administrator who relishes a good fight, the Met is widely considered the most efficiently run major international opera house.

In bringing a titling system to the Met, Mr. Volpe trumped James Levine, the artistic director, who had strongly opposed the idea. ''Over my dead body,'' was Mr. Levine's famous quote. He feared that the gadgets would distract sophisticated audiences from the musical experience. But supertitles were catching on elsewhere -- notably, across Lincoln Center Plaza, at the New York City Opera.

Mr. Volpe was not about to let elitist attitudes prevent him from reaching the general public. With his tech crew he devised a new, more discreet titling system; the individual screens, mounted on seat backs, could be turned on or off. Eventually, even Mr. Levine conceded that Mr. Volpe had been right. Suddenly, esoteric operas, like Richard Strauss's chatty ''Capriccio,'' in German, were attracting enthusiastic and comprehending audiences.

That conflict was emblematic of the mostly productive tension between Mr. Volpe and Mr. Levine. It is widely assumed that in divvying up the workload, Mr. Levine focuses on artistic matters and Mr. Volpe handles everything else. Not entirely.

Mr. Volpe has more artistic savvy than he is generally given credit for. For example, he recognized that important and provocative European directors like Jürgen Flimm and Herbert Wernicke had to be at the Met, and recruited them. Mr. Flimm's boldly updated staging of Beethoven's ''Fidelio'' and Mr. Wernicke's fantastical production of Strauss's ''Frau Ohne Schatten'' were milestones of recent seasons.

On the other hand, Mr. Volpe has stubbornly insisted that stagings of the bread-and-butter operas -- ''La Bohème'' and the like, which keep the budget in the black -- must be lavish, crowd-pleasing, traditional affairs. Traditional is one thing; ineptly traditional is another. How to explain Mr. Volpe's decision to replace a clunky, gaudy and grandiose Franco Zeffirelli production of ''La Traviata'' with another clunky, gaudy and grandiose production of the same opera by Mr. Zeffirelli? (Other directors didn't work out, Mr. Volpe said then; time was running short, so he turned to the tried and true. He got the tired and tacky.)

Naturally, as the money man, Mr. Volpe has had to veto some of Mr. Levine's artistic proposals. Yet as Mr. Levine once explained in an interview, it's wrong to assume that the best climate for an artist is one in which you get whatever you want. Limits can force you to be creative.

Still, by any measure, Mr. Levine seems to have gotten most of what he wanted: major productions of monumental 20th-century works like Schoenberg's ''Moses und Aron'' and Stravinsky's ''Rake's Progress''; commissions from John Harbison (''The Great Gatsby'') and, for operas still to come, Tan Dun and Tobias Picker; an expanded roster of Carnegie Hall concerts for the Met Orchestra and the Met Chamber Ensemble. He even got to throw his own 25th-anniversary party in 1996, a staggeringly expensive eight-hour gala concert.

Those who expect that Mr. Levine will use Mr. Volpe's announcement to expand his own control may be surprised. In September, Mr. Levine, 60, becomes music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. By intellect and artistic makeup he gets as excited over works by thorny modernists like Milton Babbitt and Elliott Carter as over ''Otello.''

Mr. Volpe intends, when the Boston appointment takes effect, to down-size Mr. Levine's title from artistic director to music director, and Mr. Levine, focusing on his larger legacy as a musician, will not object. At the Met his mind has seemed to be elsewhere for some time when he is not on the podium. But someone has to pay attention to who is singing in the umpteenth ''Tosca.'' The next general manager may have to be someone with a rich enough artistic background to take up the slack.

Meanwhile, opera fans will have two more seasons to watch the pugnacious Mr. Volpe in action. Yes, the Met has routine nights -- and worse, Mr. Volpe concedes. But night after night, he argues, his company presents more operas from a wider repertory at a higher overall level than any other major international house. He is probably right.

What's next for Mr. Volpe? In a 1996 interview about Paul Kellogg, who had just become general and artistic director of the New York City Opera, Mr. Volpe extended good wishes and added: ''I have sometimes said that when I retire from the Met, it might be fun to run City Opera. With the freedom they have, there are great possibilities.''

Maybe Mr. Kellogg should be wary. Put a red cape and plumed cap on Mr. Volpe, and with his opera villain's beard, he would make a convincing Mephistopheles.

Photo: Joseph Volpe, the general manager of the Metropolitan Opera, has said that he will step down in 2006. (Photo by Sara Krulwich/The New York Times)